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Lost Dutchman State Park

Video of our Alaska Cruise

Miscellaneous Stuff

Plucking is a style of birding in the eBird age, where birders see what has been reported in eBird or the local listserve and then go specifically to see target birds. I call this plucking off target species. This is a bit different then chasing vagrants as the plucking style of birding may be done sans rarities. It can be just to see something uncommon or irregular like a White-throated Sparrow, Sanderling etc. Plucking can even target species that are quite common but local like Common Black Hawk, or Downy Woodpecker.read more »

What is Kurtaceous you ask?
Kurtaceous is a word I made up to address a prevalent kind of email that is sent to group email listservs.
Most group email listservs have guidelines about subject matter that must be adhered to, for example I belong to the Arizona New Mexico Birdlist and proper etiquette is to only post messages about birds or birding in Arizona or New Mexico, messages about your recent trip to Texas or Africa are frowned upon and in most cases looked upon as simply bragadocious emails. And political messages about cats killing birds or ornithologists collecting birds are examples of topics that have been banned from discussion!read more »

Cindy had been working long and difficult hours opening the Sheraton Hotel downtown, her boss was so impressed with her fantastic job, that he chartered a Helicopter to the Nascar Race for us! The Helicopter belonged to legendary Nascar racer Rusty Wallace.
Click the link above for a slideshow of the rideread more »

As part of my work on a digital rights management project for Philips Electronics, I got to travel to Tokyo for meetings at Sony headquarters. After three full days sitting around a big table negotiating with a bunch of other lawyers, we were done, and I was able to play tourist in Tokyo for two days before my flight home. I visited the shrine to Emperor Meiji and saw the irises in the Imperial garden in full bloom. Also visited the Tokyo Edo Museum of history and saw a wonderful street festival that involved a lot of people marching a "Mikoshi" through the nighttime streets with lots of paper lanterns lit, pipers piping and drummers drumming...read more »

Cindy and I spent a wonderful day and overnight in a cute little cabin in Hualapai Mountain Park, just south of Kingman Arizona. The park is in the pines at 7000ft and is an isolated Mountain Range with some interesting wildlife and several bird species typically associated with SE Arizona. We cooked up some steaks and sat around a wonderful campfireread more »